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§ 24

Morning dawned, a pale and watery dayspring. Still the rain rushed down with a hissing sound upon the ferns and leaves. Susan's little company woke up and once more began to cry. They were bruised with the hard floor and wet with the seepings of the roof; moreover, experience told them that if they did not cry they might not get any breakfast, since food in that last year had not appeared so much as a matter of course as in response to tears and entreaties.

The store of bread and apples was exhausted, and Susan turned to the only remaining sack. It contained sharps and chicken-meal, more spoils of Pickdick, but bearing with them no echo of an ancient curse. There was a saucepan, and there was water in abundance, but there was no firewood, because Adam had recklessly depended on wayside supplies, and now all these were drenched and useless. If Susan had had a fire, and if her father had been there to go into the fields and milk a cow into one of their pannikins, she could have made porridge for them all—she had many times made it from worse stuff; but as things were, they had to eat their breakfast like fowls, pecking and gobbling at fowls' food till their throats were dry and pricked and sore with the husks.